#Hashtag10: A Look Back at the 10 Tags That Shaped Advertising

Twitter gave birth to the hashtag, but it has since become part of the broader online vernacular. Hashtags are as essential to advertising as jingles and taglines—they've jumped from one screen onto the next in TV ads and even appear in print. The hashtag has #transcended. On Wednesday, the hashtag also celebrated its tenth birthday.

In its decade, the humble hashtag has served to chronical our collective pop-cultural memories. If it's trending on Twitter, you can bet it has a hashtag. What is Charlie Sheen without #tigerblood? Sometimes we still wonder: #hasjustinelandedyet?

Hashtags have proven sticky (and often risky—we're looking at you McDonald's) for brands, too. Just watch Super Bowl commercials to see how deeply hashtags have penetrated marketing, and the great campaigns of the past decade have almost always had a hashtag. Here, 10 of the most memorable hashtags in marketing from the past decade.

#LikeAGirl
This Always campaign is 3 years old now, but remains timeless. It encouraged people to get beyond stereotypes of what "like a girl" means. It didn't hurt that its 2015 Super Bowl commercial was seen by approximately 115 million viewers, leading the hashtag to trend and, ultimately, endure.

#TweetFromTheSeat
Charmin is the king of potty-humor marketing, or at least it has a throne from which it does its business. The toilet-paper maker, amazingly, has more than 79,000 followers on Twitter, where it likes to tag its tweets as if they all were inspired from the toilet seat.

#MyCalvins
Calvin Klein is a classic brand and it updated its well-known slogan for the internet generation just by adding a hashtag. Its initial tweet, featuring a come-hither Justin Bieber in his skivvies, has amassed more than 160,000 retweets.

#DiGiorNOYOUDIDNT
Sass from frozen pizza brands is pretty common on Twitter these days. It's impossible to say where it started, but Totino's Pete Zaroll irreverently tweets, and DiGiorno came up with this hashtag to have some fun starting in 2013.

#NuggsForCarter
The most retweeted message of all time was brand related—but didn't come from one. Carter Wilkerson came up with promotion to get free chicken nuggets, and it worked. The nuggs for carter meme went superviral, making it a win-win for everyone involved (except the chicken).